The US doesn’t need a debt ceiling. As others have pointed out, most countries get along just fine without one. But, hey, I doubt I’ll find that many people to agree with me so let’s just move on.

Let’s blame ourselves for all this fuss.

While the consequences of a US default would be very real, and make me blench, there’s no sound economic reason for this country to be in this position. I lay blame at the feet of heightened partisanship. Partisan politics created the conditions for this drama. Partisan politics feeds it.

We–citizens, consumers, and voters–create partisan politics. We feed it. We are so used to it we now demand it from our newspapers, TV news, and blogs. It’s getting worse.

I can’t tell you how often in the last year I’ve been shocked by the political vitriol of some colleagues and acquaintances (of all political backgrounds and persuasions). People who, when I first met them ten or fifteen years ago, showed a balanced, thoughtful approach to political systems, political reality, and politicians themselves but who now are partisan. More than once in the last five years I’ve had to say, in my own house, at my own table, to someone I’d invited: Stop talking, or I don’t allow that kind of language in my house, or Seriously, shut the fuck up right now.

I’m not kidding. I wish I were. I’ve had to say such things, to adults I believed well-mannered. Naturally I don’t just bring the hammer down without warning. I begin with, Hey, isn’t this soup tasty? Which is all a socially graceful intelligent grown up should need. If that doesn’t work, I move to Well, it’s a complicated situation, which those with a modicum of manners should recognise as a hint. The next stage is Defcon 1: I’ve found discussing politics over wine often leads to trouble*. Defcon 2: Let’s change the subject and move on, which even a mildly dim person with too much wine inside them should be able to parse. But these days sometimes they don’t, at which point I move to Defcon 3: Shut the fuck up, I mean it. Not another word. (Defcon 4 is throwing them out of the house. Defcon 5 involves weapons. I haven’t had to get beyond Defcon 3 since I was in my twenties and illegal substances were involved.)

Normally well-mannered people have become red-faced ranters, and often on subjects they don’t know a lot about. (They use such stock phrases that, in the UK, I can tell which paper they read; in the US, which blog or network talking head they follow.) In other words, these reasonably educated people have stopped listening.

When people stop listening they stop thinking and start believing.

Partisanship can creep up on a person. Watch this TED talk from Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble

The upshot of this partisan stance in citizens is partisanship in voting. Partisan voting leads to partisan politicians: representatives who doggedly stick with their mantras and catchphrases and simplistic promises to their voters.

The world would be a better place if we voted intelligently. If we voted for intelligent people who would think, talk, listen, and learn.

If you don’t like what’s going on in Washington, think about this: citizens of a democracy get the government they deserve. This is the government you voted for. They are doing what they’re doing so you’ll vote them in again.

If you want to change Washington, change yourself: listen. Listen to your friends and neighbours, to the poor and rich, the white and black, the old and young, the queer and straight. Listen to the atheists and the religious. Listen to the conservative and the liberal. Listen to the artist and the scientist. Listen to the Other. Loosen your filters.

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* I actually enjoy conversations about politics but, sadly, my notion of ‘conversation’ is at odds with most people. To me, conversation is an opening, an exploration, a game in which we bat a conversational ball around for the joy of it, working with our partner/s to set up long delicious rallies or show-stopping exhibition shots. It can be a delight.

11 thoughts on “Debt ceiling furore: blame your filter bubble”

I think his general point makes a lot of sense, and the insight that algorithms have no ethics is profound. And yet, this is a dialectic process that is also linked to other spheres, so it is not just a top-down imposed bubble within the internet, but one that people assist with their choices in other areas. I think his Netflix example makes that point to some extent, but this is really one piece of a larger puzzle that comes back to the conflation of myopic ideologies with power. Hardlining is increasingly effective as a political tactic and accrues political symbolic capital. Until more nuanced, open, flexible positions can prove their efficacy a lot of folks will eschew them for the simpler, cleaner, limiting lines of hardlining.

I've found that being reasonable elicits accusations of fence-sitting, which is annoyingly distracting. But we've entered a period where confirmation bias is almost all that happens through public media, and the complexity of the issues is sometimes mind-numbing for people who for a long time thought it was politicians' job to keep all this from having to be dealt with by, you know, us.

What truly saddens me is how the lines have solidified so much that certain conversations simply can't take place anymore. As soon as a response like “Where did you get that idea?” happens, the counter-reaction is “Oh, you're one of 'those' people.” End of communication. We have some friends we manage to keep by carefully not talking about certain things…a restriction they often don't pay any attention to. I'm afraid I've gotten to the point of zero nuance and just end up saying “Well, that's bullshit.” Watching the particles fly can occasionally be fun, but cleaning the walls and carpet later gets tedious.

The US didn't have a debt limit till 1917, and the current debt ceiling wasn't established till 1939. I think the idea was to say, “You can only get the US in debt THIS MUCH and no more.” Unfortunately, now the debt ceiling has become more of a bargaining chip than any real limit on spending. We'd be much better off without it…

Perhaps the stakes have gotten higher. Perhaps the times call out for vigilance. Perhaps you don't remember how virulent things got during the Viet Nam War. I too regret how out of control and full of lies the arguments have become but standing by, biting your tongue won't prevent the unthinkable from happening. And being polite doesn't turn any tides.

Stepanie, we'll have to agree to differ. Now is exactly the time to listen instead of speaking intemperately. I do believe in speaking, not biting my tongue, as you'll see if you read more of this blog.

I do click on my “conservative” friends' links on Facebook, and I read them. Like my “conservative” friends, their links are mostly batshit loony. But I keep on clicking and reading, if only because they give me grist for my blog. The challenge is to do a rational critique of deeply irrational material, but I have a lot of experience doing that. I've been listening to other views for a long time — to the Right, to the self-styled Middle, to differing views on the Left. I listen better to Christians, for example, than they usually do to each other. That's just what bothers them, I think. Ditto for listening to antigay bigots: nothing annoys them like being listened to and refuted on the merits of their arguments.

Tiedemann's account of the Internet seems to me inadequate: he leaves out the privatization of the Internet, which numerous people warned was going to lead to exactly the kind of filtering Tiedemann talks about. The people who “built the Web as it is” were businessmen, because businessmen were handed the material, and of course they were going to shape it to their ends. Of course it was always foolish to think that the Web was going to connect us all together; but it's not surprising because so many people have dreamed of kindly robots and computers that would serve us selflessly. We need to learn how to find our way around the masses of information that the Internet can give, not ask it to to select for us. It can't do that.

On the debt ceiling, one reason for it is to control rulers' desire to start wars, a point either overlooked or softpedaled by Surowiecki, whose view seems a bit filtered to me:

“In Europe, parliamentary checks on government spending were designed to prevent ambitious rulers from waging war. This was Adam Smith’s great argument against public debts, and his urging that wars be financed on a pay-as-you-go basis. He wrote that if people felt the economic impact of war immediately – rather than postponing it by borrowing – they would be less likely to support military adventurism.”

As a born extremist, I've learned to be wary of militant flaunting moderates. It's easy to be a moderate if you can choose the extremes in advance so as to put yourself neatly between them; my Right Wing Acquaintance Number One, a university-trained historian and connoisseur of classical music who's one of the most irrational people I've ever met, does this constantly. He treads the middle road between Religious Right Yahoos and Big Government Leftists, and thinks he's being bold and daring by condemning Fred Phelps and Hugo Chavez.

I don't think we need a debt ceiling either. What we need is a better informed, more rational, more responsible citizenry. But I'm not going to hold my breath.

I think one of the knotty political/ethical questions of our times is: What, exactly, is war? When drones are controlled from a base thousands of miles away, how do we define 'combatant' and 'legitimate target'?

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